1. Field of the Invention:
The present invention relates to an optical disc playback method and apparatus capable of playing back from, for example, music Compact Discs (CD's) and Compact Disc Read Only Memory (CD-ROM).
2. Description of the Related Art:
In optical disc playback apparatus such as CD-ROM playback equipment which is capable of playing back, for example, music CD's, information is stored in a Table of Contents (TOC). This TOC will have a storage capacity of, for example, 396 bytes, so as to be capable of storing 99 XXX.times.4 bytes (control, minutes, seconds frames).
However, a single chip microcomputer with a built in RAM does not have a sufficient storage capacity to achieve this. For this reason, a RAM dedicated to use with the microcomputer was set up outside the microcomputer in CD-ROM playback equipment for the prior art. This meant that costs could not be reduced and that the number of assembling steps increased. A separate RAM could also be installed for decoding the data from the CD-ROM, but this is wasteful as this is RAM is not needed when playing back music from a CD.